Content marketing with the course developed with Google

What is content marketing?

Content marketing involves creating, publishing and distributing content and media for online readers. It includes the promotion of video, imagery, infographics and more. The focus of content marketing is on inspiring engagement. You want to go deeper than promoting your brand, aiming to create a genuine relationship with your brand’s products and services.

Brand strategy is a marketing process in it’s own right, but there is a lot of crossover with digital strategy. On our online digital marketing course, you’ll explore how to align your brand values with your online presence. Seeing exactly how brand identity impacts the tone of voice you use on blog posts, the imagery you select and even which platforms you use to share your content.

Why join a digital marketing course for content marketing?

1. Career progression - From an entry-level job, promotion is common – over half of digital marketing professionals see their career progressing in-house, while nearly a third received promotion in the previous year.

2. A varied career - Aside from the number of promotion opportunities, the day-to-day role of a content marketer varies wildly. One day you may be writing a blog post for a client, the next working on taglines and headers for a site, before ending the week running an idea session for a new client.

3. Avoid job loss due to automation - Creative industries are the least likely to be affected by automation as they require more than just number-crunching.

More about content marketing

Like any business strategy, content marketing strategies are designed and implemented to achieve specific goals. This could include increasing profit, building audiences, or establishing authority in the industry. Whilst your digital content strategy needs to drive engagement, the real aim lies in the goals and motivations behind it.

Having a solid content marketing strategy allows your business to grow in all areas, not just the digital sphere. The most important part of the digital strategy involves generating leads – attracting interest online and turning that into sales. This is called conversion.

Another important part is to build trust with your audience to ensure they don’t become just a one-time buyer. Other aspects of content marketing will focus on building up your SEO ranking and social media presence.

Digital and content marketing strategies help businesses to determine their goals, test them and see the results. It’s a circular process, with the first set of results informing the next strategy. At the most basic level, a digital content strategy includes the following steps:

Start with your goals – Why are you producing content? This should align with the goals of your business as a whole.

Determine your audience – Decide who to target, including buyer personas, demographic (stats) and psychographic (interests) research. Example questions include what type of media does your audience like most? How do they consume media – Mobile? Desktop? On the go? At home?

Audit your existing content – Work out what content you already have to ensure there’s no repetition and to assess what has already worked well. Consider which areas can easily be optimised towards success.

Generate ideas – Your audit will inform this step and set you on your way to deciding what content you need to include in your strategy. This could contain anything from blog posts to podcasts, infographics to videos, as well as ideas for social media.

Publish and share your content – This is the final step before you start it all again! Publishing and sharing content involves so much more than hitting go - you’ll need to align publishing your content with your social media and email channels to optimise distribution.

A content marketing course gives you the opportunity for a highly satisfying and creative career with fantastic opportunities for progression. Centred on the generation, production and management of content, it’s a great career for those who like to see the impact of their work first hand.